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The book starts with a good introduction of how the internet is potentially dumbing people down. For instance, it is now:
- Harder to concentrate
- Harder to focus and read a complete article whilst absorbing the content
- Harder to dedicate time to anything
- Harder to not be overwhelmed by a couple of paragraphs (or more)
The book turns a little to anatomy and history, explaining how the brain works and how information is captured. Went into the history of how the alphabet came to be and the evolution of books. It sounds like when people started reading books they were completely immersed and brought into the book whereas now we are distracted by any single thing, no matter how small.
An interesting point that struck me was that when we surf the internet, our mind is going at 100 miles per hour and although we are consuming a lot more information, nothing is being retained. It is a bit like a bottleneck, we can consume as much as we want but the process of bringing what we see from short term memory to long term memory gets overwhelmed and so after a while there is overflow and everything stops. There is also the issue of easily being distracted, and in a world where we are constantly connected, it is so easy for that notification to take our focus…
